On a sunny spring day in 2014, in a courtyard off busy Borough High Street in London, I passed through a low door into a small room, and promptly slipped through time. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the four-hundred-year-old George Inn, and the barman poured my pint of London Pride, two City gents took a seat in the creaking wooden booth, or “snug,” next to me. “So, The Russians have invaded Crimea then,” said one. “This ain’t going to end well.” If a more evocative form of time travel than settling down for a pint in an ancient British pub has been invented, I don’t know about it. These places are not museums, but operative, tangible embodiments of the past. Even those that become tourist attractions, like the George, still welcome the people who live and work around the corner. The fact that the two besuited chaps next to me could well have been having that exact same conversation in 1853, attired in similarly drab City garb, is a testament to the glorious continuity of the British pub, and the resilience of London traditions. Highgate and Hampstead in north London cause raptures in historic-pub connoisseurs. Having spent most of their civic lives as tiny, unimportant villages bordering the alluring metropolis, they still retain a rural air and a country-girl-gone-bad kind of charm, the suburban equivalent of a naughty milkmaid in a Vermeer painting. They both have narrow, curving high streets, crammed with decorous brick cottages and bulbous, many-paned shopfronts, now housing fey gluten-free cupcakeries. These twin thoroughfares meander coquettishly down, like flirty rivulets, from the top of the hill. Neatly tucked into a side lane in Hampstead is the 18th-century Holly Bush, the kind of shabby-genteel local where you might find an Austenian impoverished clergyman furtively playing cards in a back room. From there, you can walk to the 16th-century Spaniards Inn, which is the sort of boozer Kit Marlowe probably started a bar fight in. Here, the busy arterial B519 narrows to the width of a horse and cart, strangled by the inn on one side and a now-defunct tollhouse on the other. Standing at the bus stop opposite the Inn, you witness a strange, centuries-old dance. Traffic from one side will flow through, while vehicles on the other side of the narrow gap wait patiently… for a couple of minutes. If a gap in the oncoming traffic presents itself, the driver on the waiting side seizes his chance, initiating a flow from that side which blocks traffic on the other. Cars back up, until – plus ca change – another gap occurs. But what happens when, as during busy times, there are no gaps? Whoever is leading the charge on the “waiting” side will eventually be seen mouthing an obscenity, and simply barge through. Hence the frequent noises, heard inside the pub, of angry horns, scraping metal, and colourful insults. It is astounding that the pub hasn’t been demolished due to structural weakness caused by five centuries of wagons, carts, mail coaches, aristocratic carriages, and automobiles smashing into its corner wall. On our last evening in London, the spring air scented with daffodils, we stay close to home, walking the sweeping crescents of elegant, cream-painted Georgian houses. Rounding a corner, we are assailed by a pungent, smoky scent. There in the gathering dusk, windows glowing with the inviting flicker of firelight, is the “Earl of Lonsdale.” I can tell straight away from the decorative etched glass windows that it’s a classic Victorian corner pub. Pressing my nose against the glass, I let out an exclamation of delight as I see it’s in fine condition: glass “snob screens” and oak-panelled snugs intact, unvarnished oak floorboards. In pride of place sits a blackened, pot-bellied, coal-burning fireplace that looks to have been hard at work for most of the last two centuries. On either side are two leather-covered benches, each big enough for one. We heave open the heavy wood door and step into the warmth. There’s no music, just the crackle of the fire and low chatter of the regulars. That peculiar sense of timelessness descends again. The barman, pouring my pint, remarks: “Shocking news out of Crimea, eh?”